The paper addresses a number of issues regarding the extent to which trafficking may be applied to migrant domestic workers who enter under the kafala system of sponsorship in the Middle East.
Unlike most other countries in the Arab region, Egypt does not have a regular or significant intake of migrant workers who are contracted to perform the domestic chores of Egyptian households. The legal history of domestic work in Egypt is best characterised as one that denies the validity of paid domestic work as an employment relationship and so it is explicitly excluded from local labour law. While most domestic workers are Egyptian, obtaining work visas for migrant domestic workers is difficult, if not impossible.
The threat of climate change and the need for energy security pose serious challenges for policymakers. Part of the strategy to tackle these issues rests on multilateral initiatives increasing the momentum of global environmental governance efforts. Nevertheless, these problems create a further dilemma for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. On the one hand, the impact of climate change will heavily affect these countries and thus requires their active participation in mitigation efforts.
This chapter focuses upon labour migration to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, since the massive incomes to these countries, particularly from the oil price increase in the 1970s, resulted in one of the great migration stories of the twentieth century. Still significant, today labour migration to the GCC accounts for over 10 per cent of all migrants globally.